Tess Rooney – 18/7/98
This article is for anyone who has the fate of being married to, or living with a geek. It is not dedicated to those people who, on a daily basis have to cohabitate with a person who will leave the cap of the toothpaste, or who will leave the seat up/down/somewhere else entirely, it is dedicated to those people who have mountains and mountains of crap in their house, crap that isn’t theirs and crap that they have no idea what so ever of what it does.
Its geek crap, its wires, cables, chips, mother boards, IO cards, modems, vesa cards, connecters, monitors, SIMMs, dead mice (not the organic ones), spare parts for the solder sucker, IDE hard drives… its crap, all of it crap!!! And the geek simply says: “But honey…
You just don’t understand!”. Oh and keyboards, I forgot to mention keyboards. Stacks of them, all of them broken, most of them over five years old, but apparently that’s where the value lies, “because they don’t make them like they used to”.
Last night, I cracked, I had a headache and the place was a mess of writhing coax cable and bits of unidentifiable electronics. “Get rid of it! All of it! I can’t stand it anymore.” I rent my hair and my husband, torn between having a sane wife and his stuff, made a decision. “Okay, I’ll go through it and throw some stuff out.”, I was silenced… did he really say throw some stuff out? Could it be true? It was, and before my eyes he had grabbed a box and begun to sort his stuff.
I turned and, attempting to be
helpful, picked up a bit of keyboard that had lost its outer case. “You could throw away this.”, but no he clutched it to his chest like a wounded child and glared at me… “Are you mad?” he hissed, “You don’t understand…This is full of switches!”.
Well excuse me, it looked like a broken keyboard, to 95% of the world that makes it a piece of junk, but to a geek it means reclaimable bits, switches, connecters, wires, bits of old solder, fluff… Hell one day you might need a bit of solder and a piece of fluff, couldn’t possibly throw it out now. The keyboard stayed, but some stuff did go, four boxes of it in fact.
To add to the horror I was feeling my darling geek told me about a place that he wants to visit, it is a surplus electronics warehouse, somebody actually makes a living out of what my husband does for fun. I had this vision of this guy who had a garage full of crap, crap he loved, crap he tended with care. This guy had a wife who, like me, broke down and demanded that it disappear. But this guy had a plan, a masterful plan, a plan to save his crap! He would claim to sell it! Ahh the beauty, the simplicity…
Because what really happens is that people like my husband go there and buy some stuff, and whilst they are discovering that this guy is selling a three phase capacitor with variable dual voltage adjustable terminator offset, this guy is finding out what crap my husband and others of his ilk have and is attempting to buy it from them. Its the perfect setup.
Just as my husband was finishing up, my friend came over dragging her new man behind her – geeks hate going out unless there is the possibility of meeting up with other geeks – as my friend and I exchanged pleasantries her new man noticed what my husband was doing, his response… “Hey, is that a full length 8-bit MFM hard drive controller card! You can’t get rid of that!”. “No its okay, I have two so I thought I’d throw this one, hey do you want it?” and so the cycle is repeated. Well at least his full length 8-bit MFM hard drive controller card went to a good home. Heck, maybe my man can still visit it.
Once, before I married my husband I walked into his room at his flat, it was the biggest room in the house, it was huge, big enough to swing a cat, a dog, or a string quartet in, there sat my love to be on the floor with his friend, who is incidentally very aptly named Schmoo. Surrounding them over every available piece of floor was crap, it was the crap’s day out. Pizza in one hand, coke in the other their dreamy smiles said it all, this was geek heaven. Not only could they play with their crap they could see it all at once too. I turned and left them to it.
Geeks are a strange breed, pack rat hoarders, pizza guzzling, caffeine swilling larger than life stereotypes, they seem to thrive on problems that look impossible to solve to us mere mortals. But to any person in love with a geek, they are the finest of true loves. Sensitive, caring, grateful… And as long as you can put up with their habits they make wonderful faithful partners.
That night tucked up in bed, I rolled over to face him, and asked him if that was his first time. He nodded, his face flushed with love and affection… No other woman had ever gotten him to part with his stuff, for me, he threw out hardware. Now that’s devotion.
